I guess you could say I have a couple things to blog about.
After I visited Edinburgh last summer on Folk ChoIreland Tour, my grandmother asked me, upon seeing my pictures, "Is Edinburgh a dirty?" "It looks like a dirty," she said. Now, if she means, "Is Edinburgh a dirty trickster for hiding all those stupid, calf-killing hills in the middle of all its pretty stuff??!?!!," then, yes - as this trip confirmed once again - Edinburgh is a dirty. A dirty, indeed. My time in Edinburgh this time began with a pre-sun arrival on the overnight Megabus. After wandering off the bus, semi-comatose and barely able to walk after our attempts to sleep on bus seats for 10 hours, my travel companions set off for our hostel. It was, after all, something like 6:30 in the morning, so where else could we have gone?
The problem with this, of course, is that we knew only that our hostel was, like, close enough to the castle that you can just walk up to the castle and you'll see it, so no no no, you don't need a map. The castle, after all, is easy to find! All you have to do to get there is walk up a hill made of tears, cobblestones, and the withered calf muscles of those too weak to finish climbing it!
At just before 7 AM, giant backpacks on our backs, glasses on our faces, and pain in every square inch of our bodies, we made it to the castle.
Worth it.
We watched the sun rise over Edinburgh from one of its most perfect vantage points, snapping hundreds of pictures and eventually discovering that, sure enough, our hostel literally was right there. The hostel, as it turns out, was pretty darn awesome itself. When we rolled up at 8 AM, though our rooms wouldn't be ready for several more hours, they let us spend as much time as we wanted lounging around on their common-space couches. I, in fact, made myself so at home - half-sleeping on the couch, lying down, with a coat thrown over my face to block out the blinding rising sun - that one of the hostel staff made fun of me for being hungover.
Actually, sir, I am not hungover. I am this pathetic while stone-cold sober, after walking up a hill.
After regrouping for a while, my subset of the giant London Program group in Edinburgh that weekend headed back to the castle for an official tour. This was informative, entertaining, and mostly a good excuse for us to take yet more pictures. Did I mention my travel group this weekend included two fancy DSLR owners? I'll mention it now, just in case you aren't jealous enough of my life.
In our natural habitat
The remainder of our first day was spent walking around the city, window shopping on the Royal Mile, pretending we were native students at the University of Edinburgh Library Bar, and eventually, making the decision to spend our second day on a bus tour of the Scottish Highlands.
That last decision was a very, very good one. The Wee Red Bus on which we took our tour held 17 people, including our driver and guide, (O) Danny (Boy). The rest of the group was as follows: a lone Asian man from San Francisco (or possibly Texas...close enough); a couple from Kerry, Ireland, the husband of which smoked at least one cigarette at every single one of our 10 or so stops; a couple from some unknown Francophone nation who refused to speak to anyone but themselves (all in French) or to answer the question, "So, where's everyone from today?"; and 16 kids from the Notre Dame London Program. Normally, I am the complete antithesis of this custom of "Domerbombing." I find it incredibly obnoxious when kids from the London program go places in huge groups, mostly because it is incredibly obnoxious. On this occasion, though, it was, admittedly, pretty awesome. If you're ever given the chance to Domerbomb the Highlands, as bad and vaguely terrorism-y as that sounds, do it.
Our tour consisted of stops at various gorgeous photo ops throughout the countryside of the Highlands,
Meh
free time to climb around on the ruins of ancient castles,
The angle from which ancient Scottish princesses would have taken their MySpace pics
and, most notably, an hour of roaming time at Loch Ness.
The above photo is not a random product of Google Images and is not of a Lego statue at DisneyWorld.
We learned that yelling "HARDCORE PARKOUR" is a thing among not just ourselves but among Scottish tour guides, too, and that bagpipes and house music occasionally combine to really, really weird effect. We created a million and one inside jokes, took a million and two pictures, and had an unbelievable day.
Sunday took us back to Edinburgh, to a mass complete with Steve Warner-esque acoustic guitar improvisations and, of all things, "Though the Mountains May Fall," and to lunch at the Elephant House, where JK Rowling wrote the books that are everything. In all, this weekend was absolutely bonkers, and all of the amazing experiences of the weekend are totally worth the 25,000 calories' worth of peanut products and Pringles we ate on the train ride home.
Les Mis, too, was incredible. It is safe to say that this production ranks worlds above my last West End experience on the scale from mind-numbingly awful to mind-blowingly awesome. The Enjolras we saw was even almost as good as Aaron Tveit! (Sorry I'm not sorry, crazy fangirls who will never rank a movie performance over a West End one. Aaron Tveit, much like Harry Potter, is everything.) I'm staying in London this weekend, and after the ten days I've had, I'm going to need it. Following next weekend, dear readers, you can look forward to the tales of my early-March exploits in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Bruges, Belgium. A hint? They will involve chocolate.
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